Happy New Year! We have made it through yet another year and we have a fresh new year stretching out before us! I have seen a lot of highlight reels depicting everyone’s favorite everything coming through my social media feed. I’ve seen favorite books, best meals, best restaurants, and highlights of vacations—everyone’s best moments of their lives from 2022. It seems everyone cannot wait to show off the very best of their lives from the past year.
Isn’t it interesting that it’s usually not the best moments of our lives through which our characters are most impacted? Rather, it is those hard seasons, the really hard times when we are forged in fire that fundamentally transform us the most. Yet, those moments are the ones we are least likely to share. We not only don’t want to dwell in the hard season but we want to act like the hard seasons don’t exist. However, to dismiss the hard seasons of our lives is to dismiss the tough work God is doing in our lives.
Take the story of Ruth in the Bible—we like that story! We like that Ruth is loyal and loving to her mother-in-law and follows Naomi back to Naomi’s homeland where Ruth has to work very hard to scrape out a living for them. Ruth’s hard work pays off and she ends up catching the eye of the town’s most eligible bachelor. They get married and she never has to worry about how she will provide for Naomi or herself ever again. This is a lovely story but it’s not the full story of Ruth’s life. When we rewind a little bit further, we get to the part of the story where Ruth was young and she married. If her devotion to Naomi is any indication, then Ruth was a woman who loved deeply and had to have been devastated when her husband died. The life she thought she was going to have was shattered. She had a bad year, followed by another as she tried to put the pieces of her life back into some sort of shape that made sense. We don’t know exactly how long elapsed between her husband dying and her new marriage to Boaz.
We live in a world where everyone is rushing around trying to “live better” than they did the year before. But that may not be how your life was—it’s okay if you felt as though you just survived 2022. I’m praying this will be the best year yet for you, but it might not be. It might be a year when, like Ruth, your character is shaped and refined. Even if it’s not something that looks good on social media, this might be the year in which God forges the character traits in you that you will be remembered for in years yet to come—just like we now remember Ruth’s character all these years later.
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